This summer I spent six weeks in America, which was both everything and nothing like I expected.
Like all the other foreigners I knew in DC, the city I spent five weeks in trying to live, work, and not sink into the swamp it's built on, I was enormously starstruck by being able to experience all the American brands I heard about in the flesh. Walmart, Taco Bell, Dunkin Donuts, Target, Twinkies, Barnes & Noble, all the rest I can't remember. I didn't really understand the full power of Walmart until I was standing in the one store in the whole of DC (Walmart is, as I understand it, more of a suburban thing) slack-jawed and wide-eyed because of the sheer volume and diversity of products. At the same store you can buy a bicycle, the week's groceries, a phone, cleaning supplies, a DSLR camera... Americans like to merge several speciality stores into one, because they believe in minimising the amount of places you have to go for everything. I wonder how long it will be before one store contains everything available in the country.
"The food is so good in America!" Lies, lies, lies. I had only two meals there that I will remember and cherish as very nice food - one was Ethiopian food at a restaurant four blocks from my house, and one was Mexican food in Columbia Heights. I don't think Americans ever learnt the art of portion control, because one day me and a friend went to a Thai restaurant for lunch and having ordered fried rice I received a mountainous pile of rice over which I could barely see my friend. When I think of all the food I ordered and wasn't able to finish, there's a lot of it. I don't know where it all goes. I hope they don't waste it but I suspect they do.
Americans are open and friendly in a superficial sort of way, and they really love telling you their life story. I once spent a mildly terrifying five minutes in the toilets of a Carrefour on the outskirts of Paris where people had written their life stories on the walls, but in America people aren't so anonymous or shy. They'll strike up a conversation with you anywhere. Shop assistants ask you how you're doing and I never worked out if they wanted an answer. I find a lot of my fellow Brits too repressed but I never quite stopped being a little freaked out by how Americans pounce on you. One woman told me to have a blessed day and I don't even think she was joking.
In DC, I noticed a lot of people reading Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, which is nowhere near as popular here, and I think that's probably because it's about America. One of the British people I was working with was reading it, and said the parts about being a foreigner in America are totally accurate. I also read a book about a Soviet-era detective who ends up in New York in a convoluted plot, and I definitely wasn't a stranger to the terror and awe he felt landing in America, the glorious home of rampant capitalism (the epitome of which, by the way, is Times Square. Wow).
America is way too big. It took us five hours by bus to get from DC to New York City and another five hours to get from NYC to Boston. My little island country began to feel smaller and smaller, and when I looked at a map to plot out our epic journey from the District of Columbia to Massachussetts it was only a tiny part of the East Coast. There is so much more out there.
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